By his own account, David Abrahams has been donating cash to Labour for 40 years, since he joined the party when he was 15.

However, even that apparently simple fact has been challenged with reports that his actual date of birth is 1944 and not 1954 as he reportedly says.

However many decades ago it began, Abrahams' donations were at the time an irrelevance to the Labour party.

The son of a former lord mayor of Newcastle, Abrahams describes himself as "a very private person".

But even before he admitted using intermediaries to donate hundreds of thousands of pounds to Labour he has struggled to stay out of the limelight.

Abrahams was in the front row when Tony Blair made a speech in June in his former Sedgefield constituency, announcing his decision to stand down.

The glare of publicity first - unwelcomingly - shone on the wealthy property developer after he launched his campaign to become an MP in 1990.

Abrahams was chosen as Labour's prospective parliamentary candidate for Richmond, North Yorkshire but was deselected after a series of newspaper reports about his business and family life.

A local newspaper reported that Abrahams - a private landlord - was known to his tenants by another name, David Martins, under which he also held company directorships.

Abrahams said he used the separate name for his business activities at the behest of his late father, who wanted his son's success to be "independent of the family name".

To compound the local party's doubts, a woman then alleged that Abrahams had persuaded her to pose as his wife at the selection meeting.

Anthea Bailey said she and her 11-year-old son, had pretended to be his family as a "business arrangement" to enable him to create "the right impression".

At the time of his selection, a press release was reportedly issued stating that Abrahams lived with his wife and son, although he had never been married.

Abrahams described the allegations as "false" and part of a smear campaign but, after surviving an initial deselection meeting, he was ousted in a second vote.

The row surrounding Labour donations has prompted scrutiny of the business practices of Abrahams, who is the director of six property companies in Newcastle.

It was reported that Abrahams' multimillion-pound business park development at Bowburn in County Durham was initially blocked by the Highways Agency because of a blanket ban on further development beside the congested A1.

But in October last year the agency lifted the ban on the development - and a separate one near Newton Aycliffe further south.

Suggestions that the developers had hoped to gain some planning advantage from the then transport secretary, Douglas Alexander, were robustly denied in Whitehall.

Last night, Abrahams said: "Any suggestion that I have made donations in exchange for favours is false and malicious. I will not hesitate to issue proceedings to protect my reputation."

The "very private person" has become the central figure in the most public of rows.